For centuries, Scientists and Historians mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, males hunted and females gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America shows another story, based on new research conducted at the University of California, Davis.
“An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturns the long-held ‘man-the-hunter’ hypothesis,” explained Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology and the lead author of this analysis, “Female Hunters of the Ancient Americas.” It had been published in Science Advances.
“We believe that these findings are particularly timely in light of contemporary conversations surrounding gendered labor practices and inequality,” he added. “Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past.”
Called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru, investigators discovered an early burial which contained a hunting toolkit with projectile points and animal-processing tools. The objects accompanying people in passing are inclined to be those who accompanied them in existence, researchers said. It had been ascertained that the hunter was probably female based on findings from the team’s osteologist, James Watson of The University of Arizona.
Revealing a wider pattern
The unexpected discovery of an early female hunter burial directed the team to inquire whether she was part of a broader pattern of female hunters or only a one-off. Of those, 27 people were correlated with big-game hunting tools — 11 were female and 15 were male. The sample was sufficient to “warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial,” investigators said. Moreover, the analysis identified the Wilamaya Patjxa female hunter since the earliest hunter burial in the Americas.
Of hunters in these inhabitants were feminine, the study said. This level of involvement stands in stark contrast to recent hunter-gatherers, as well as farming and capitalist societies, where hunting is a decidedly male activity with low levels of female participation, certainly under 30 per cent, Haas explained.
The study was conducted in cooperation with multiple UC Davis labs. Parker, a forensic expert in the Department of Environmental Toxicology, aided ascertain sex via a proteomic procedure he developed. In Professor Jelmer Eerkens’ laboratory, Jenny Chen, an undergraduate researcher at the time of the study, discovered the different isotopic signature of meat intake from the bones, further supporting the conclusion that the Wilamaya Patjxa female was a hunter.
While the study answers an old question about sexual division of labor in human societies, in addition, it raises some new ones. The team today wishes to comprehend how sexual division of labor and its consequences In various times and places shifted among hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas.
Source: https://www.ucdavis.edu/